House of the Hanged (2 page)

Extending an upturned hand, he carried on towards the two men.

‘A few roubles, comrades,' he pleaded pathetically, ‘for a veteran of Tannenberg.'

Mention of the bloody battle didn't curry any sympathy.

‘Papers,' snapped the smaller of the two Chekists.

‘I haven't eaten in days.'

Not so far from the truth, but Tom found his hand slapped aside.

‘Papers!'

‘Leave him,' growled the other. ‘You heard what Zakharov said – he has a beard.'

Zakharov. There was no time to process this news – or to give thanks for the last-minute precaution of changing his appearance – as two more men bowled into the building through the north doors. They were wearing leather jackets crossed with cartridge belts. The taller of the two Chekists turned to them.

‘Neratov, you guard the door.'

Any suspicions that Neratov might have had of Tom were dispelled when the smaller Chekist shoved him dismissively aside. The scruffy man with the bag in his hand had evidently been checked and cleared. While the three other policemen fanned out into the cathedral Tom crept sheepishly past the glowering Neratov and out through the doors.

In his haste to put the danger behind him, he slipped on the icy steps leading down from the pillared portico. Falling hard, he felt something go in his wrist. He bit back a cry, not wishing to draw attention to himself.

He glanced up and down Admiralty Prospekt: the pavements were deserted, just an isvochik heading towards him, drawn by a shaggy white horse. It was free, and Tom waved it down, almost laughing at the absurdity of his good fortune.

The coachman, muffled in furs, was bringing the small sledge to a halt when Tom heard the shout.

‘Stop him!'

It came from the cathedral. The tall Chekist stood dwarfed between two pillars of the north portico, waving furiously.

‘Stop him!' he bellowed again. ‘He's an enemy of the Soviet!'

With a flick of the driver's reins the sleigh took off. Tom stumbled after it, unable to get any meaningful purchase on the compacted snow, falling quickly behind as the horse's trot became a canter. Realizing the futility of the pursuit, he cut left across the street and disappeared into the park on the far side.

Overhead, a half-moon hung in a cloudless sky, and even beyond the pool of light thrown by the street lamp he could still pick a route with ease. Unfortunately, this also meant that his pursuers would have no trouble following his deep tracks in the snow.

That first lone shout had now become a chorus at his back. Outnumbered, the only thing he had in his favour was that he had prepared himself for such conditions. The snow in the park was deep, thigh-deep in places, just as it had been in Finland. Before leaving Helsinki, he had trained hard in anticipation of their flight from Russia, pushing himself on occasions to almost masochistic extremes. Not only was he in better physical condition than he'd ever been, but he had also accustomed himself to the hunger and the cold until his mother would barely have recognized the lean, gaunt spectre of her own son before her. He had grown a beard, and he had learned to stoop convincingly, knocking a few inches off his height, making him one of the crowd.

‘Come on, you bastards,' Tom muttered to himself. ‘Let's see what you've got.'

What they had, it turned out, was guns. And they weren't afraid to use them.

The first few shots ripped through the skeletal branches above his head. He assumed they were warning shots until he heard something whistle past his left ear, death missing him by a matter of inches.

Crouching, he drove his legs on, knowing that every hard yard gained now would equate to three or four when the snow-bound park gave way to Admiralty Quay. He lost a little of his advantage when he was suddenly pitched forward into the snow, as if shoved hard in the back by a phantom hand. Scrabbling to his feet, he figured the bullet must have struck the bag slung over his shoulder, embedding itself in the jumble of clothing he'd put together for Irina.

A primeval impulse to survive, to live beyond his twenty-two years, took complete possession of him now. He ploughed on like a man sprinting through a waist-high sea to save a drowning child. Pleasingly, the shouts of his pursuers had dimmed almost to silence by the time he finally broke free on to Admiralty Quay.

He knew that the frozen stillness of the river lay just beyond the low wall ahead of him. Should he risk it, skittering across the ice, out in the open? No. He bore left, away from the Admiralty building, his legs burning, but with a lot of life still left in them.

Run
, he told himself.
Settle your breathing and stretch out your stride
. He would take the next street on the left, head south, lose himself in the back streets around the Mariinsky Theatre.

Tom glimpsed the revolver in the other man's hand a split-second before they collided. Both had been slowing to make the turn, but the head-on impact still sent them sprawling in a tangle of limbs.

The gun. Where was it? No longer in the man's hand, but within reach. Tom lashed out with his foot, slamming the heel of his boot into the man's head, catching him in the temple. This bought him a precious second, enough to give him a fighting chance. The two of them scrabbled and clawed for possession of the weapon, the lancing pain in Tom's damaged wrist numbed by the panic.

The moment he realized he'd been beaten to the prize, the Cheka man froze. Keeping the revolver trained on him, Tom scrabbled to his feet.

‘Please . . .' said the man, raising a futile hand to stave off the bullet.

Tom glanced down Admiralty Quay: vague smudges of movement in the distance, drawing closer, but too far off yet to pose a threat.

Tom looked back at the man. He was young, Tom's age, his lean, handsome face contorted with fear, and in those pitiful eyes Tom saw everyone who had ever been cruel to him, everyone who had ever hurt him, deceived him, betrayed him.

‘
Vade in pacem
,' he said quietly.

Go in peace – the same parting words of Latin which the priest had offered to him in the chapel at St Isaac's just minutes before. He didn't know why they sprang from his mouth; he didn't care.

He was gone, disappearing down the darkened street, flying now on adrenaline wings.

The apartment building was a drab five-floored affair on Liteiny Prospekt, near the junction with the Nevsky. The grey morning light didn't do it any favours.

Tom watched and waited from across the street, one eye out for Cheka patrols, or anyone else showing undue interest in the apartment building. He had got rid of the bag, abandoning it in the coal cellar where he'd passed a sleepless night, swaddled in the clothing intended for Irina. The bullet that had knocked him flat in the park was now in his hip pocket. He had tried to think of it as his lucky charm, but how could it be? If Irina wasn't dead by now, she would be soon. He was too much of a realist to believe otherwise.

He knew how the Cheka operated; months of tracking their working methods from the safety of Finland had introduced him to the brutal truth. In Kharkov they went in for scalping and hand flaying; in Voronezh they favoured rolling you around in a barrel hammered through with nails. Crucifixion, stoning and impalement were commonplace, and in Orel they liked to pour water over their victims, leaving them to freeze outside overnight into crystal statues.

This is what the Revolution had brought out in men: not the best, but the very worst, the stuff of bygone eras, when Genghis Kahn and his blood-thirsty hordes had run merry riot through the Steppes.

In no way could Tom be held accountable for the dark state of nature that lurked in men, but he was to blame for choosing to gamble with it, and losing. How would things have turned out for Irina if he hadn't tried to intervene? She might have weathered the incarceration, the torture, and been released. What if he had underestimated her? Should he not have had more faith in her resilience?

These were the questions that had kept him awake in the coal cellar, and he couldn't imagine a time when they wouldn't plague his thoughts. If he had come here to this grim apartment building on Liteiny Prospekt, it was only with a view to dragging some small consolation from the disaster.

He had a street number and an apartment number, but no name. Markku had told him that the name was of no importance; the one he knew her by was probably false anyway.

‘It's a woman?' Tom had enquired.

‘It's something close,' had been Markku's enigmatic reply.

The problem lay in slipping past the concierge un noticed. It was well known that the building caretakers of Petrograd were rapidly becoming the unofficial eyes and ears of the Cheka. It was even rumoured that some made false denunciations of their residents, leaving them free to pillage the apartments once the ‘counter-revolutionaries' had been carted off.

Seeing an elderly woman rummaging for her key at the entrance door, Tom hurried across the street, arriving as the door was swinging shut behind the woman. He stopped it with his hand, waited a few moments, then slipped inside.

The cavernous entrance hall was dark and deserted. He heard the woman puffing her way up the stone staircase, and through the glazed doors directly ahead of him he could see a man shovelling snow in the courtyard.

The apartment was on the third floor, towards the back of the building. He knocked, and was about to knock again when he heard a female voice.

‘Who is it?'

‘Markku sent me,' he replied, in Russian.

‘I don't know anyone called Markku.'

‘He told me to say that you make the best
pelmeni
in all Russia . . . after his mother's.'

Three locks were undone before the door was opened as far as the guard chain would permit. A small woman, a shade over five feet, peered up at him defiantly. Her black hair was threaded with silver strands and pulled back tightly off her lined face. Her dark eyes were clear and hard, like polished onyx. They roamed over him from head to toe, then past him, searching the corridor behind. Only then did she release the chain.

Tom followed her along a corridor into a large and extravagantly furnished living room. The rococo divans, Persian rugs and gilt-framed portraits – one of a booted general, another of some high-bosomed ancestress – had obviously been intended for a far nobler space than this; here, they looked awkward and overblown, eager to be elsewhere.

Tom turned and found himself staring into the barrel of a handgun.

‘Take off your coat,' said the woman. ‘Take it off and throw it on that chair there.'

There was nothing strained or hysterical in her voice. She might just as well have been a doctor inviting him to remove his clothes in a consulting room.

Tom did as she requested, unquestioningly, watching while she searched the coat, knowing what she would find. Her eyes only left his momentarily, to glance down at the revolver as she pulled it from one of the pockets.

‘This is a Cheka weapon,' she said, levelling her own gun at his head.

Tom cowered. ‘It was. Until last night.'

‘You're not Russian.'

‘I'm English.'

She switched effortlessly to English, with just the barest hint of an accent. ‘And where were you born?'

‘Norwich.'

‘A flat and dull county, Norfolk.'

‘You obviously don't know it well.'

‘Sit down. Hands on your knees.'

Tom deposited himself on a divan. The woman remained standing.

‘Who are you?' she asked.

‘Tom Nash. I was part of the Foreign Office delegation sent over here last summer.'

‘A little young for that sort of thing, aren't you?'

‘It was my first assignment after joining.'

‘You knew Bruce Lockhart?'

‘Of course, I worked for him here.'

‘Lockhart was lucky to get away with his life.'

‘So was I. It was Markku who got me out of the country after they stormed the embassy.'

‘And how is Markku?' she demanded flatly.

Tom and the tall Finn had become fast friends since their escape from the capital. They'd had little choice in the matter; the Consulate in Helsinki had lodged them in the same room at the Grand Hotel Fennia.

‘Stuck in Helsinki,' said Tom. ‘Frustrated. Drunk most of the time.'

‘He's still one of the best couriers we've got. So why, I'm wondering, do they send us a boy from the Foreign Office?'

‘I'm with the Secret Intelligence Service now.'

‘Is that right?' She made no effort to conceal her scepticism.

‘I was seconded when I got to Helsinki.'

This wasn't quite true. Tom had pushed for a transfer to the SIS in Helsinki, anything that would keep him close to Petrograd, to Irina. A desk job back in London hadn't been an option in his own mind, and he had managed to persuade others that his skills as a Russian-speaker would be best served closer to the front line.

‘Prove it,' said the woman.

‘I can't.'

‘I suggest you try.'

Tom hesitated before replying. ‘ST-25.'

‘That means nothing to me,' she shrugged.

But she was lying; he had seen the faint flicker in her obsidian eyes. She knew as well as he did that ST-25 was the codename for the sole remaining SIS agent in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks had brutally broken the American spy network over the autumn, and they were close to achieving the same with the British. The elusive ST-25 remained a thorn in their side, though. The Cheka had even set up a special unit devoted to hunting him down.

‘You want his real name?' said Tom. ‘I can give it to you if that will help.'

‘She doesn't need to know my real name.'

The voice was low and steady, and it came from behind Tom.

He turned to see a man of middle height step into the room. It was hard to judge his age – early thirties maybe – the thick dark beard blunting his handsome features showed no signs of grey.